John - Another Way of Telling: A New Theory of Photography

ALSO BY JOHN BERGER

FICTION

The Foot of Clive

Corkers Freedom

A Fortunate Man

A Seventh Man

G

The Trilogy: Into Their Labours (Pig Earth,
Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Photocopies

To the Wedding

King

Here is Where We Meet

From A to X

POETRY

Pages of the Wound

NON-FICTION

A Painter of Our Time

Permanent Red

Art and Revolution

The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays

The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles

Ways of Seeing

The Success and Failure of Picasso

About Looking

The Sense of Sight

Keeping a Rendezvous

The Shape of a Pocket

Selected Essays of John Berger (ed. Geoff Dyer)

Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger)

Bloomsbury Publishing

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 1982 by

Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society Ltd

This edition first published in 2016

Copyright John Berger and Jean Mohr 1982

John Berger and Jean Mohr have have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

All rights reserved.
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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: Tpb: 978-1-4088-6445-6

ePub: 978-1-4088-6446-3

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For Beverly and Simone

This book would not have been possible without the support, both financial and theoretical, of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. I would like, once again, to express my solidarity with this Institute. J.B.

Preface

We wanted to make a book of photographs about the lives of mountain peasants. During seven years the men and women from our village and in the nearby valleys have collaborated with us. What we show is in the most profound sense their lifes work.

We also wanted to produce a book about photography. Everyone in the world is now familiar with photographs and cameras. And yet what is a photograph? What do photographs mean? How can they be used? Such questions which began to be asked with the invention of the camera have not, until now, been fully answered.

Our book is divided into five parts. In the first, Jean Mohr writes about aspects of his experience as a photographer, and particularly those aspects which illustrate how photographs are ambiguous. A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

The second part is an essay which explores a possible theory of photography. Most theoretical writing about the medium has limited itself to either the purely empirical or to the purely aesthetic. Yet photography naturally leads to the question of the meaning of appearances in themselves.

The third part of our book consists of a sequence of a hundred and fifty photographs without words. This sequence entitled If Each Time... is a reflection upon a peasant womans life. It is not a report-age. We hope that it may read as a work of imagination.

The fourth part discusses some of the theoretical implications of the way we have tried to tell a story in If Each Time.... The final very brief section is a reminder of the reality from which we began: the life work of peasants.

Beyond my camera

by Jean Mohr

WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE?

A Sunday afternoon in autumn. The large market square of the country town of B... It was sunny, but it wasnt a sun that warmed, it simply shone with its violent light on people and things. Some were directly in this light, some were in shadow. There were no half-measures about this light. The peasants from the neighbouring countryside paid little attention to the quality of light; they had come to the fair to buy or sell cattle.

As for me this violent sunlight posed certain technical problems. I would have preferred a cloudy sky, even mist. Making my way between the cattle, the peasants and the cattle dealers, I was looking for some angle of approach. Warming-up in both senses of the word. I wasnt playing any games, I dont like that, I wasnt pretending not to take photographs. In any case its not easy to trick a Savoyard peasant. And I prefer to be frank about what Im doing, whenever its possible.

Near a line of calves some men were talking. Dryly. They had seen me but were pretending to ignore me. Suddenly one of them spoke out, not really aggressively, but rather more to amuse his colleagues.

So what are you doing there?

Im taking some pictures of you and your cattle.

Youre taking some pictures of my cows! Would you believe it? Hes helping himself to my cows without having to pay a sou for them!

I laughed along with the others. And I went on taking my photos. That is to say, taking in my own way what was before my eyes and what interested me, without paying and without asking permission.

THE STRANGER WHO IMITATED ANIMALS...

I was visiting my sister, who lives in the university town of Aligarh in India. The previous evening, when I first arrived, she had warned me: Dont be surprised if youre woken up early in the morning. Theres a young girl, a neighbour, who is blind, but who likes to know what is happening. She may well come to see who the new arrival is.

Tired by the long journey in the train that had stopped at every station, I quickly fell asleep. And when I awoke next morning, it took me several minutes to remember where I was. I could hear something scratching near the window, a fingernail lightly rasping against the mosquito net. The young blind girl said Good Morning. The sun had been up for several hours.